Thursday, November 27, 2008

Why TooManyTabs is Not JUST a Set of Bookmarks

TooManyTabs is designed to give you much more functionality than a set of tab-like bookmarks. It saves browser's memory, organizes tabs and it is easy to use!

When a unpinned tab is restored to the normal tab bar, we do not merely just re-open the URL. The fact is, TMT will try to reload the thing from disk cache (if possible) and the tab state, including tab history and scroll position, will be restored. In other words, TMT tabs are real, working tabs that is merely "frozen". "Freezing" the tab in this way allows all active scripts to be stopped and thus saved memory. The only exception is pinned tabs - every time a pinned tab is restored to normal tab bar, the tab state is not restored to prevent the page from loading outdated content. The program logic is actually very straight forward and is easy to understand.

The next issue is about the number of tabs that you can store in each row. The truth is it depends on how large is your Firefox window. We decide not to scroll the row like Firefox because it is simply too hard to locate your tabs when there are too many of them. We try to make it dynamic so that you can see as many tabs as possible in a reasonable size. The tabs would shrink just like a normal tab and a warning would appear when the window size becomes too small to view all the tabs in the row. I hope our users would understand why we want to implement it this way~

We have receive a lot of suggestions on different features. Our team would consider each of the suggestion carefully and improve TooManyTabs gradually. Thanks for your support.